Bahia's Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824–1900

Abstract

Brazil's independence was unique within Latin America. The transition from a colonial holding to an independent nation witnessed no major battles, retained continuity with the same royal family, and, most significantly, produced an empire rather than a republic. Within the limited arena of battles, the most important skirmishes took place around Salvador, capital of the Northeastern state of Bahia. Since the 1820s, patriots there have long labored to preserve this distinction. The creation of a commemorative celebration known as Dois de Julho (Second of July) was central to this effort and has been surprisingly long-lasting in its power to mobilize people in the streets. It is still celebrated today and continues to be one of Bahia's most significant civic festivals, although it never succeeded in achieving status as a national celebration.Hendrik Kraay's book Bahia's Independence seeks to uncover the early roots of this celebration and to trace its transformations over the first century of its existence. Over the course of his work, he argues that the festival was political in its origins and more generally attempts to correct an older historiography that he proposes has obscured the festival's true political origins and significance. Following the contributions of James Sanders and others, he argues that the early years of the century witnessed surprisingly broad and liberal participation in politics at the local level. Insisting that participants were also engaging in nation making through involvement in political events such as the festival, he advocates that politics in early independent Brazil were not nearly so restrictive as once believed.While the framing of Kraay's work engages with these larger political questions, the chapters themselves delve into close and painstaking study of the festival itself and its involvement in the larger Bahian political scene. The first three chapters are dedicated to tracing change over time. In chapter 1 Kraay shows that the origins of the festival, often assumed to be popular and somewhat spontaneous, were in fact more political than early folklorists and historians wished to acknowledge. Kraay situates the festival both as a continuation of civic and religious celebrations of the colonial era and as a tool by local radicals to influence political debates. The next two chapters continue this chronological narrative, revealing a broader popular participation in the 1850s and 1860s that became threatening enough to political authorities who were attempting to impose order that some elements of the celebration were banned altogether. Chapter 4 steps back to try to analyze participants' understanding of the festival, an undertaking made difficult by the uneven record of newspapers during the nineteenth century, the primary source base for Kraay's study. The event was framed without reference to Brazil's system of slavery, although it did incorporate an indigenous female symbol (referred to as a cabocla) as a central icon and element in the celebrations, despite growing discomfort with the symbol at the close of the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 looks at how a dynamic theater scene, charged with developing national themes, took up the topic of Bahia's independence struggles in galas and plays for the elite. And chapter 6 analyzes the battles that unfolded over the placement of and symbols to be used with a monument dedicated to the event. As Kraay shows, though city officials tried to relocate the center of festivities to a more formal square in the center of town focused around the new monument, popular understandings continued to ground the festivities elsewhere.As he moves through the analysis in the course of the chapters, Kraay returns to several larger points. One is that Bahia's focus on battles as the ultimate cause of independence challenged traditional narratives that exclusively privileged the actions of Pedro I. This counternarrative revealed a significant form of radical liberalism in Latin America that early on imagined the nation as having popular roots and origins, albeit with somewhat unclear racial dynamics. A second is that regionalism and nationalism fed into one another, a point well developed for the twentieth century. Kraay suggests, however, that this nineteenth-century regionalism was set apart from its twentieth-century counterparts by the latter's focus on cultural distinctiveness, a contrast that deserves further development.Kraay's research throughout the book is fine-grain and detailed, and he has dedicated 20 years to uncovering all available sources for this study in archives and especially newspapers. The reader, however, may sometimes get lost in the details, particularly in the chapters tracing the festival's alterations over time; more streamlining would have helped the reader hold on to the important points more easily. Such a critique, however, should not take away from the quality of this work. The book's larger arguments are engaging and important, and this meticulous work should interest scholars of nineteenth-century popular politics across Brazil and Latin America.